Even if lower taxes had allowed a greater demand for nannies, there was not the supply to meet it. Few working-class English women wanted to lose their independence and become live-in servants. They would not have taken nannying jobs even if they had been on offer. A glimpse of a nanny pushing a pram was as rare a sight in the seventies as a beggar on the streets. Outside central London, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, you rarely saw either.
Today it is the economically egalitarian but sexist past which seems a lost world. In ‘How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement’, the American writer Caitlin Flanagan described how she saw it changing in 1978, when at the age of fifteen she was sent to her first psychotherapist. ‘I can’t remember a thing I talked about on all those darkening afternoons,’ Flanagan said.
But I do remember very clearly a day on which she suddenly sat up straight in her chair and began discussing, for reasons I could not fathom and in the most heated terms imaginable, not the vagaries of my sullen adolescence but, rather, marriage—specifically, her own. ‘I mean, who’s going to do the shit work?’ she asked angrily. ‘Who’s going to make the pancakes?’
I stared at her uncomprehendingly. The only wife I knew intimately was my mother, who certainly had her discontents, but whom I couldn’t even imagine using the term ‘shit work,’ let alone using it to characterize the making of pancakes—something she did regularly, competently, and, as far as I could tell, happily (she liked pancakes; so did the rest of us). But in 1978 shit work was becoming a real problem. Shit work, in fact, was threatening to put the brakes on the women’s movement.
The question feminism raised was, if middle-class women were to realise their potential and carry on with their careers after childbirth, who was going to look after their children? Who was going to take them to the doctor, wash their dishes, change their nappies, or pack the lunch boxes? The only solution the idealist feminists of the time imagined was binding marriage contracts or some other form of persuasion that would oblige men to do their fair share of chores. It was idealistic because few feminists believed that more than a handful of men were prepared to do their fair share of chores. Even if there were, an upper-middle-class couple determined to pursue interesting, rewarding and lucrative careers would still not have the time for childcare and running a home, however scrupulously they shared out the shit work.
The second wave of feminism was breaking on the rock of domestic necessity.
Until, like magic, says Flanagan, ‘as though the fairy godmother of women’s liberation had waved a starry wand’, globalisation came to the rescue.
With the arrival of a cheap, easily exploited army of poor and luckless women—fleeing famine, war, the worst kind of poverty, leaving behind their children to do it, facing the possibility of rape or death on the expensive and secret journey—one of the noblest tenets of second-wave feminism collapsed like a house of cards. The new immigrants were met at the docks not by a highly organized and politically powerful group of American women intent on bettering the lot of their sex but, rather, by an equally large army of educated professional-class women with booming careers who needed their children looked after and their houses cleaned. Any supposed equivocations about the moral justness of white women employing dark-skinned women to do their shit work simply evaporated.
Financial liberation for the fortunate followed. The engine that drives household income inequality is the professional couple who can draw high salaries throughout their working lives by contracting out the childcare that once forced women to stop working (and earning). The high-flying woman, and by extension her partner, relies on equality between the sexes enforced by equal pay acts and anti-discrimination legislation. Yet the results of sex equality are profoundly unequal. As sexual inequality declined, inequalities of wealth shot up, indeed had to shoot up, so that nannies could keep the professional marriage in business—and, although no one realised it for a while, the peeping Toms of the media too.
From Charles Stewart Parnell on, newspaper sex scandals have destroyed public careers. Men tempted from hearth and home faced the consequences when the betrayals of their private life became public. Now that the upper-middle class has privatised its private life, scandals come from inside as well as outside the home. When American activists want to stop their president from giving a plum job to a political opponent, they know the best place to start digging for dirt is in his or her childcare arrangements. If they scrutinise the nannies, housekeepers and cooks, there is a fair chance they will find illegal immigrants paid in cash to keep the costs down and away from the prying eyes of the tax authorities.
Unlike Parnell, David Blunkett* did not fall because he had an affair with a married woman. In our liberated age, Tony Blair saw no objection to Blunkett pursuing his former lover in the courts to ascertain paternity of her unborn child. Blair had to fire him only when the friends of Kimberley Fortier leaked to the press that Blunkett (or his staff at the Home Office) had helped Fortier by speeding up a visa application for her nanny, Leoncia ‘Luz’ Casalme.
The nanny was at the centre of the affair, and the cause of the downfall of a public figure, yet she was barely discussed. Like many another servant, she was at once essential and invisible. Her superiors talked through her as if she weren’t in the room.
The first thing to notice was that Fortier and Quinn had hired a Filipina rather than a local girl. It was not as if there weren’t English women who might have filled the vacancy. After the collapse of full employment in the seventies, jobs as servants were often the only jobs available for women, while Gordon Brown’s employment and benefit policies had the perverse consequence of forcing mothers from humble backgrounds to leave their own children to look after other people’s. The habitual meanness of the rich may explain why Fortier and Quinn went for poor world labour—Fortier did not want Blunkett to arrange a new visa to make her nanny’s life better, but so that Casalme could look after her children when the family travelled to its Irish holiday home. Stinginess may not be the whole story, however. In an interview with the Mail, the nanny described Fortier as ‘the only person I have ever worked for who has made me cry. She is a loving mother but also a very pushy woman. What she wants she has to get, and if she doesn’t get it she starts yelling and shouting.’
You cannot reduce an English nanny to tears too often and expect to hold on to her. As a friend from one of the better London postal districts put it to me: ‘There are lots of things English women won’t do. They won’t cook and clean, if they’re not paid to cook and clean, and they won’t be bullied.’
Vulnerable foreigners are another matter: a trade union organiser’s nightmare. They are cheaper and more pliable and unlikely to know how to ask for the protection of the law. Because they live under their employer’s roof, it is all but impossible for outsiders to hear their grievances and help remedy them. The illegals among them are outside the rule of law because the fear of deportation stops them going to the authorities.
Occasionally, charities manage to break sensational accounts of rape and violence. More typical are the stories like that of another Filipina nanny I have encountered, whose life is close to Flanagan’s serfdom. She worked for a Middle Eastern family in London. They locked her in her bedroom at night and searched her when she left the house to make sure she was not stealing the spoons. She escaped and found employment with what she took to be a progressive young English woman in Chelsea. The civilised appearance was an illusion. Her new mistress harried and abused her. A drop of water left on a ludicrously impractical teak kitchen surface produced a tantrum; a failure to obey the most trivial command produced a screaming fit.
The nanny was close to a nervous breakdown. When she said she wanted to leave, her mistress said she would shop her to the Home Office as an illegal immigrant if she dared defy her. (She fled anyway, and has not been picked up yet.)
Hers was a small tale of human misery from a potentially vast pool. Half the world’s migrants are women. They look after the children, the sick and the old of the rich countries while the children, the sick and the old of their own countries fend for themselves. In 2006, the American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich edited